One Last Thing Before I Go

gives Silver a tender look. “You don’t look so good.”
    “I’ve been better.”
    Ruben smiles sadly, then leans forward and kisses his forehead. Silver can’t remember the last time he did that. He feels his father’s stubble scratching his forehead, can smell his familiar aftershave, and in that instant, he experiences the sense memory of the boy he once was, safe and loved, who somehow managed to grow into this mess anyway.
    His father doesn’t seem to be in any rush to go anywhere, so they sit in the car in silence, looking out the window, waiting for it to rain.

CHAPTER 25
    H e wakes up paralyzed, his arms and legs frozen. For a few minutes he lies there, convinced that he’s died, that this is what death feels like, that the mind stays alive longer than the body, trapped inside, going slowly mad until its life force is completely drained. There was a
Twilight Zone
episode about this. He remembers watching it with his parents in their bed, tucked between them under their comforter, the familiar smell of his mother’s lilac-scented moisturizer filling his nostrils. The man in the episode, unable to move, was pleading in a terrified voice-over as they pronounced him dead.
    He hopes that his own brain dies before they put him in the ground, because he has never done well in enclosed spaces. He starts to panic at the prospect, and then gets angry at how unfair it is to have to be scared of anything after you’ve already died. Isn’t that supposed to be one of the perks? No more fear and worrying, no more lugging around all the shit that got tangled up in your mortal coil over the years? That’s kind of what he’s been counting on.
    And that’s when he realizes that he’s been scratching his chest. He does the math, a bit slower than one might think, but ultimately reaches the inescapable conclusion that he’s not dead, and not even very paralyzed. He wiggles his toes, bounces his knees, and whistles the theme from
Rocky
, which he mistakenly attributes to
Star Wars
for a few minutes. When they were kids, Chuck and he would play the
Rocky
theme on the living-room turntable and conduct fake boxing matches, hissing out their own sound effects with each blow. He’d forgotten about that, about Chuck, about how it feels to be brothers. It’s been a long time since he’s thought of himself as someone’s brother. He should drop by there like he used to and see how he’s doing. He doesn’t remember when he stopped.
    When he stands up, he briefly goes blind. Everything goes white, and he loses his balance, crashing into the wall before he trips over his sneakers and falls on his face. When he rolls over, his vision has returned.
    This is getting tricky.
    Casey sticks her head into the bedroom, sees him lying on the floor. The alarm that spreads across her face is both validating and heartbreaking, so he clasps his hands behind his head and attempts a look of casual repose.
    “What are you doing?” she says.
    “I thought I was dead.”
    “That’s how it looked for a moment there.”
    She comes over and lies down on her back beside him. They stare up at the same cracked ceiling.
    “You thought this was what death looked like?”
    “Well, I couldn’t see for a little bit.”
    She appears a little worried about that, and he hates that he’s enjoying her concern. “Do you want me to call Rich?” she says.
    “I absolutely do not want you to call Rich.”
    “You sure? If you die in an hour and I didn’t call, I’ll be traumatized.”
    “You’re already traumatized.”
    “A little,” she admits. “So, what are we doing down here?”
    “Just, you know, considering the universe.”
    “That isn’t the universe. It’s your ceiling.”
    “Don’t be so literal.”
    “The universe is one fucked-up place.”
    “That seems to be the consensus.”
    He watches her as she traces the long cracks in the ceiling with her eyes. Her horizontal profile makes her look much younger, like a little girl.
    “What would you like to do today?” he says.
    She gives him a funny look. “What are my options?”
    “Sky’s the limit.”
    She considers it for a moment. “Brunch?”
    “I say the sky’s the limit and all you can come up with is brunch?”
    “I’m just not sure we live under the same sky.”
    He gives her a look. She gives it right back. We could have really had something good, he thinks, regret filling his lungs like water.
    “Sometimes I think that too,” Casey says, and he realizes